Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls — It Tolls for Thee Carnival Triumph, Thee Carnival Splendor, and Thee Other Carnival Ships

If you’re into the current stainless kitchen appliances craze, you’d certainly tire of it quickly aboard a cruise ship. Unless, of course, you’re on a Carnival cruise ship, in which case you’d be ecstatic just seeing the inside of a place that once held unspoiled food as you’re being towed back into port in the aftermath of the de rigueur engine or laundry room fire. A few days without edible food makes even an MRE sound like a gourmet meal. But, once again, I digress.

Stainless . . .

Stainless Everywhere

And Way too Much to Eat

It’s truly incredible to think how much food is prepared for upwards of 3,500 passengers and crew. That’s a lot of chow. Speaking of chow, my inside industry sources tell me that there’s absolutely no truth to the rumor that Carnival ships are going to start placing emergency supplies of Purina in cabins next to the life-jackets. Oh, wait, this article is about NCL. Sorry. Got sidetracked.

Amazingly, there are even charts posted about the kitchens displaying the different Main Dining Room fare depending on the day of the cruise.

By the way, did I mention stainless? Take another look and this steel-clad kitchen:

Dishing It Out

The Racks

Where’s Tonight’s Menu?

But there’s more to a kitchen than just the kitchen. A kitchen wouldn’t be a kitchen with a bakery. This particular bakery makes everything from chocolate chip cookies (which our tour group sampled) to French baguettes and everything in between.

Bread Dough Rising

Baked Bread Cooling

And then there are the various food storage areas. This part of the tour was positively chilling, as we walked into storage areas from everything from dairy products to frozen foods.

Chilling

Positively Chilling

A Cool Place to Be

Keeping Stuff in Cold Storage

While we’re on the subject of food storage, I understand that Carnival Cruises is issuing all passengers long sticks and stocking copious quantities of hotdogs and marshmallows. That way, when there’s an engine or laundry room fire, the passengers can roast their own food as they camp out on the decks. No word yet on how Carnival intends for their passengers to trench out a latrine area, but there have been reports that some of their ship pools have been emptied of water and filled with dirt.

Professional kitchens usually use stainless steel for everything, because it lasts the longest and is easy to clean. The kitchen aboard the German cruise liner Europa I visited years ago looked very much the same. So do many restaurant kitchens (two chefs in the family and a father who used to outfit cruise liners).

It’s the same here, Cora, but the trend for the past twenty years has made stainless the go-to material for kitchen appliances in the home kitchen as well. Professional decorators have been predicting the end of the stainless craze for the past five years, but it just keeps hanging on.

It is getting easier to find stainless steel appliances for home kitchens over here (which used to be very difficult even five to ten years ago), but overall Germans still have a weakness for wood fronted kitchens.